Contents

Gameplay

In Daggerfall, as in all The Elder
Scrolls games, players are not required to follow
questlines or fill specific character archetypes.

Daggerfall features a spell creation system where,
through the Mages Guild, players can create custom spells with
several different effects. The game will then automatically
generate the mana
cost of the spell based on the power of the effects chosen.

Other features include an equipment enchantment system (similar
in concept to the spell creation system), the ability to buy houses
and ships, a variety of clothing and equipment, dynamic political
relationships between kingdoms, the ability to become a vampire, werewolf, or wereboar, and the combat
system, which uses mouse movement to determine the direction and
effect of weapon swings in melee combat.

The political system is supported by a net of Guilds, orders,
and religions, all with unique tasks and quests. Joining and
contributing to these facilities allows the player to raise ranks
and achieve higher reputation in the game world, which affects how
NPCs and other factions view the player.

Daggerfall has genre-typical gore elements and some
sexual topics. It displays cartoonish nudity (showing breasts but
no genitals) both on NPCs and on the character's paper doll when all equipment is removed.
The game installer includes a password-protected childgard
feature that hides blood and corpses (instead showing just the
skeleton of the corpse), disables sexual topics (though not
removing all nudity), and ensures the character portrait is wearing
underwear at all times.

Game
world

A first-person screenshot from Daggerfall, demonstrating the user
interface and graphical capabilities of the game.

The player can travel almost anywhere on the map, each area with
hundreds of visitable locations.

Each dot on the map represents an entire town, city, or
dungeon.

Daggerfall, like the other games in the Elder
Scrolls series, takes place on the fictional continent of Tamriel. In
Daggerfall, the player may travel within the High Rock and
Hammerfell provinces of Tamriel. A wide range of formidable
enemies, the strongest of which are the Daedra, make the journey
through these realms difficult.

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date,
featuring a game world estimated as being 62,394 square miles
(161,600 square kilometers or 40,400,000 acres) with over 15,000
towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to
explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the
game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01%
the size of Daggerfall, but it should be noted most of
Daggerfall's terrain was randomly generated. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of Morrowind in the third game has 10 square
miles (25.9 square kilometers).[1][2]The
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles
(41.4 square kilometers) to explore. [3] In
Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for
the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000
NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. However,
the geography and the characters in these later games are much more
detailed.

An automap was implemented to help players navigate through the
lengthy tombs and ancient underground fortresses. Players have to
visit approximately 6-8 areas in order to finish the game, although
a total of 47 areas are present. A limited array of building blocks
were used to construct the towns and dungeons, causing some
reviewers to complain about the game's monotony. In 2002, Morrowind, the third game in
the series, responded to this issue with a smaller, more detailed
world with unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater
individuality.

Story

Daggerfall is a city in the Breton
homeland of High Rock. The player is sent here at the personal
request of the Emperor. He wants the player to do two things.
First, the player must free the ghost of the late King Lysandus
from his earthly shackles. Secondly, the player must discover what
happened to a letter from the Emperor to a Blades spy in the court
of Daggerfall. The letter reveals that Lysandus' mother, Nulfaga,
knows the location of the Mantella, the key to resurrecting the
first Numidium (a powerful iron golem). The Emperor wants his spy
to force Nulfaga into revealing the location of the Mantella so
that the Blades can finish the reconstruction of the Numidium.
Through a series of mishaps and confusions the letter fell into the
hands of an orc by the name of Gortworg. Gortworg, not knowing what
the Mantella is, consults Mannimarco, the King of Worms (the leader
of the Necromancers). During this time, the Underking who
originally destroyed the first Numidium because of its misuse by
Tiber Septim, is recuperating deep within a tomb of High Rock,
after expending so much energy destroying it the first time. In
order for the player to give the Mantella to anyone, the player
must kill King Lysandus' murderer and put his ghost to rest. After
accomplishing this, stealing the Totem of Tiber Septim from King
Gothryd of Daggerfall, and freeing the Mantella from its prison in
Aetherius, the power of the Mantella restores the Underking's
power.

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Endings

Daggerfall has six different endings:

If the player activates the Mantella himself while in
possession of the Totem (the
controlling device of the Numidium), the Numidium will slay the
player, go out of control, and be destroyed by Imperial forces.

If the player gives the Mantella to the Underking, he absorbs
its power, passes into eternal rest, and creates a large "magicka
free" area around himself.

If Gortworg is victorious, he uses the Numidium to destroy the
Imperial forces and the "Bay Kings," the "rulers" of the several
provinces of the Iliac Bay. The Underking arrives shortly
thereafter to destroy the first Numidium once and for all, losing
his own life in the process. Gortworg then succeeds in creating
Orsinium, a kingdom of Orcs.

If the Blades are victorious, they succeed in recreating the
first Numidium and use it to defeat the Bay Kings, defeat the orcs,
and to unite all the provinces of Tamriel under the Empire
once again.

If one of the Bay Kings wins (any of them), they use the first
Numidium to defeat all the other kings just before the Underking
destroys it and himself.

If Mannimarco receives the Mantella, he uses it to make himself
a god.

Continuity

Since Daggerfall had six very different endings, the writers of
the Elder
Scrolls series had to be creative when writing the sequel. It
is revealed in books in the sequel Morrowind that at the end
of Daggerfall, an event known as "The Warp of the West" or "The
Miracle of Peace" had occurred, that is, because in order to
retrieve the Mantella, the player must enter Aetherius (a spirit
realm), a disruption was caused in spacetime, because one of the
Gods of Aetherius (Akatosh) is the god of time. Therefore, all of
the endings of Daggerfall occurred simultaneously: the PC is slain
by the Numidium; the Kingdoms of Daggerfall, Sentinel and Wayrest
all consolidate political power in their spheres of influence; the
"Bay Kings" and the Imperial forces are defeated by the Orcs, who
then create their own kingdom of Orsinium; all of Tamriel is united
under the Empire once again; the King of Worms becomes a god;
another incarnation of Mannimarco becomes the leader of the Order
of the Black Worm; and the Underking, reunited with his heart at
last, dies.

Development

Work on The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall began
immediately after Arena's release in March 1994.[4]
The new project saw Ted Peterson assigned the role of Lead Game
Designer.[5]
Originally titled Mournhold and set in Morrowind, the game was eventually
relocated to the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, in Tamriel's
northwest. Daggerfall saw the replacement of
Arena's experience-point based system with one that
rewarded the player for actually role-playing their character, and
revolved around skills.[4]
Alongside skill-set tweaking, Daggerfall came equipped
with an improved character generation engine, which included not
only Arena's basic class choices, but also a class creation
system.[6] The
system, which was designed primarily by Peterson, with influences
from GURPS, allowed players to
create their own classes, assigning their own skills. Peterson
notes that he's always enjoyed character creation systems, and
that, although he doesn't "like playing Gamma World," even now he'll sometimes
"roll the dice and see what kind of mutations my character would
develop if I actually wanted to play the game." "I know," he says.
"I'm weird."[5]Daggerfall was initially developed with an updated 2.5D Raycast engine, like Doom's, but it was eventually
dropped in favor of the XnGine
engine. Daggerfall realized a very immense game world,[4]
filled with 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000.[7]

Daggerfall saw little influence from other video games of the time.
"Computer role-playing games weren't very interesting while we were
working on Daggerfall. I can remember playing the latest King's Quest,
Doom, and Sam and Max Hit the
Road while working on it, but I can't say they had any
profound impact on the story or design." The game's most profound
influences came from whatever analog games and literature Julian
LeFay or Ted Peterson happened to be playing or reading at the
time, such as Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask, which
influenced "the quest where the player had to find the missing
Prince of Sentinel", and Vampire: The Masquerade, which
influenced "the idea of vampire tribes throughout the region".[5]Daggerfall's plot was opened up beyond Arena's clichéd and linear "find the
eight missing pieces of the "Staff of Chaos" and use it to rescue
the Emperor from a dimensional prison",[8]
and "that most cliched of all role-playing conventions, slaying the
wicked wizard", to a "complex series of adventures leading to
multiple resolutions".[5]Daggerfall was released on August 31, 1996,[9] within
the game's intended release window.[10] a
release again suffering from buggy code. Although
Daggerfall's code was, in contrast to Arena's, patchable,[8]
the yearning to avoid, in LeFay's words, "all the stupid patches we
had for Daggerfall" led to a more cautious release
schedule in the future.[11] Ted
Peterson left Bethesda following Daggerfall's release, and
went to work for a series of companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco: Film Roman, AnyRiver Entertainment, Activision and Savage
Entertainment.[5]

On July 9th, 2009, Bethesda made Daggerfall available as a free,
legal download on their website, commemorating the 15th anniversary
of the Elder Scrolls franchise [12].

Bugs

A player finds a quest impossible to complete, potentially due to
Daggerfall's various bugs, and is unable to help a possessed little
girl.

Daggerfall had numerous software bugs in its initial release, to
the point that the game started being called "Buggerfall" by some.
The biggest of said bugs was that it was theoretically impossible
to complete the main story in the original retail version. Even
after numerous patches, including a special patch that adds extra
items released by CompUSA,
many issues were still left unsolved.

The evil Orc Jubaimorgan was also considered a bug by some, but
was actually an integral part of the game.

One bug caused players running up stairs to fall through the
terrain into a featureless black space. Another infamous topic was
that of "the horse and the carriage": a player wanting to enter a
town after its gates were closed for a night had to use a
levitation spell to fly over the walls or the climbing ability to
climb them. In any case the player's horse and carriage (which
could be purchased in the game) stayed with the player as if they
had been in the player's pocket. Additionally, there was a bug in
which, once the player had reached the top of the wall, if the
player jumped while running towards any of the battlement-style parapets on top of the relevant
wall, it was possible to perform a leap which hurled the player
hundreds of feet through the air, invariably killing them upon
landing unless they were very well trained in jumping (such as a
master acrobat character), or were skilled or lucky enough to land
upon a roof, or unless the player knew any spells to slow aerial
descents. This jumping bug would occur when the player jumped
towards other slanted surfaces, such as roofs.

A crucially plot-critical bug would cause the letter from the
"King of Worms to Princess Morgiah of Wayrest" to disappear if the
player fast traveled from the Dragontail Mountains to Wayrest. This
could be circumvented by traveling the full distance in real-time,
a journey that would take several hours, depending on whether or
not the player had acquired a horse.

Most of the bugs that could break the Main Quest were
fixed/patched. As computers grew faster, other issues arose;
work-arounds, such as DOSBox,
are available that maintain the game's playability on most modern
PCs.